By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Features Reporter
There’s a guy up on King Street going about his business of teaching Brunswick Middle School math who is a living legend. Every morning, he sets his mind to “prepare a good lesson, so the kids are receptive to what I have to tell them,” he says. “It’s a bit of a trick to teach. I do magic in the classroom.”
Add to that math class just about any sport you can name—with squash at the top—and Jim Stephens has had the magic touch. During his storied 31-year tenure at Brunswick School, Stephens, now 71, has achieved national fame as a squash coach: he was named 2014 U.S. Olympic Committee National Coach by U.S. Squash and one of Squash Magazine’s “Top 50 Most Intriguing, Interesting, and Influential People of 2014,” and has presided over two National Squash Championships and 14 New England Squash Championships won by his Brunswick teams.
Now, add recipient of the Lifetime Award from the Greenwich Leadership Forum (GLF) to be presented on May 3. “Jim Stephens was overwhelmingly nominated to be the honoree for two reasons,” says Greenwich’s W. Grant Gregory, GLF board chair. “Jim personifies the highest level of character and ethical leadership, which he has successfully imparted to thousands of Brunswick students in the classroom and on the athletic field. Jim is truly gifted and his humble leadership style has changed the lives of many students and families.”
Among those thousands who prospered under Stephens’ tutelage are two Gregory sons and a grandson. “He has that way to unlock potential, of using sports as a platform for building character.”
Enter Stephens’ eighth grade math classroom and there on the white board are the catchwords of his teaching, a list of “Character Strengths.” Self-control is at the top, followed by Grit and Truth. “You can build character through sports,” says Stephens. “But it’s harder to do in the classroom. You’ve got kids for 40 minutes. Self-control is the hardest thing to teach.” He adds, “Being truthful is hard for kids.”
Trust isn’t on the list, but this teacher and coach attracts it. “He relates to younger people with his sympathy, his empathy,” says Brunswick Headmaster Tom Philip. “They listen to him to a much higher degree than most people his age. It just works with him.”
That relationship continues after graduation. “With the alums, he’s the first person they seek out,” says Philip. “He plays a part in their lives, he attends their weddings.”
Stephens points with great pride at the photos of winning Brunswick teams that line the hallway of the school’s exhibition squash court, but as he leads the way into the impressive gallery of nine glass-enclosed squash courts, he fails to say the courts are called “The Stephens Squash Center.”
“Build it and they will come,” Stephens likes to quote as he introduces the squash center, but the real story is how Stephens built a squash presence in the town.
“I started working as the tennis pro at the Greenwich Field Club in 1970, when there was no squash for kids,” he says. “There were only four courts, two at the Greenwich Field Club and two at Greenwich Country Club. It was a game for men. You played with a heavy wood racquet and a hardball. So I started working on getting kids to play.”
Stephens got a boost in his efforts when softball squash arrived from overseas. And then, in 1985, Norman Pedersen, former headmaster at Brunswick, entered his life. “I was giving tennis lessons to Norman and I said I’d like to teach at Brunswick. He then offered me a job teaching sports—and math. I told him I’d never taught math! He said, ‘You’ll be able to do math.’ He gave me a math textbook and said, ‘Study it until next week and you’ll do fine.’”
Stephens was teaching his students soccer, tennis, and squash, developing “some very good tennis teams,” he says. “But squash was nonexistent. There were no courts and no players.” Over the next few years, Stephens was driving his budding squash players to distant matches at Deerfield, Taft, and Hotchkiss. “It wasn’t easy,” he recalls. “Trying to beat those guys was hard.” Fast forward a few years. “Now Greenwich is one of the strongest areas in the U.S. for squash for boys and girls.”
How did the math teacher survive teaching fifth through eighth graders? “Math is a tough subject to like,” he says. “A lot of it is getting them to like the game.”
So, their first day back at school, he asks what they did that summer. “Then they’ll ask me, and I tell them I memorized the Webster’s Dictionary. I did it mathematically. I memorized key words on each of its 1,600 pages.”
He then asks this reporter to choose a number, and writes down the number 711 on the white board. He reverses it to 117, then subtracts the two numbers to get 594. He writes down on the board the word “haircut,” to be found on page 594 of the dictionary. It’s there at the top of page 594, and it’s dumbfounding.
By year’s end his students are math fans. “When they get motivated, they love what they’re learning and see a reason for learning it—it gives them a goal,” he says. “Sometimes it takes going to college for it to happen. I didn’t know I was going to teach math until after college.”
This brings the conversation back to the “Character Strengths” he has on his white board; he’s asked where he traces his own character influences. “My dad, he used to hammer it in me. He worked for The New Yorker.”
On his deathbed his father asked, “Jim, do you know the direction to heaven?”
“No, Dad.”
“Turn right and go straight. Try to do the right thing with your life—don’t get distracted.”
So what keeps him young? “The kids keep me young,” he says. “I like keeping them engaged. My favorite hobby is magic. I’m doing a magic show for third graders.”
In Northeast Harbor, Me., where Stephens and his wife go in summer, they can be found in Arcadia National Park, biking 15 miles before breakfast. “Then we play two sets of tennis, swim in the ocean and have lunch, then go play golf.” But he has, you might say, consented to join a croquet league “with a band of guys in their 70’s and 80’s.”
“We’re all in our whites,” he says. “It’s actually a lot of fun.”
